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right too, though Liz Hardwick had been insufferable once, in the days when her three sons were one after the other sailing through O-levels in ten or more subjects and being accepted by the university of their choice. But now that they have all come down, or dropped out, as the case may be, and the whole thing has subsided into a welter of chucked jobs and sobbing daughters-in-law, Liz has grown more humble, and dares not patronise the rest of us with the old buoyancy.
    My anxious gaze roved on past Liz and her husband, past the innocuous and self-absorbed couple from over the road, and came to a horrified stop just by the tray of drinks.
    Anna! What had possessed me to invite Anna, on this evening of all evenings? Or had Ralph invited her, in all innocence? After all, she is his sister-in-law—he probably felt that she and Simon ought to be here on such an occasion. What is it about Anna? It’s not exactly that she is censorious, or prying. She doesn’t deliberately drag skeletons out of cupboards —no one more surprised, or more apologetic, than she when the bones fall rattling round her feet. No, it’s just that in her presence you become suddenly much more aware of your shortcomings, of the shortcomings of your house and family, than you ever are normally. It is as if the glitter of her great swinging earrings, the sheen of her raven-black hair, dragged back with dramatic ruthlessness from her big, pale face—it is as if all this added up to a sort of spotlight blazing into the dark corners of your life. She is like one of those magnifying mirrors—secret, devastating things that you peer into in the privacy of your bedroom, confronting realistically at last your giant pores, your monstrous blemishes.
    And yet, as I say, you can’t accuse Anna of doing it deliberately, or even of having a superior or patronising manner. This evening, for instance, she was simply standing by the table, drinking gin and talking about Italian taxi-drivers ,making Ralph and her husband laugh. She wasn’t even looking in my direction, and yet at the very sight of her all my secret doubts and anxieties began tingling in the forefront of my mind. Supposing Mervyn was a dwarf! Or—to be more realistic—suppose he was just very small—shorter than Sarah—a little runt of a man? Or suppose, on the other hand, that he was grotesquely tall, with stooped shoulders and fatuous, poking head? As I watched Anna throw back her head and laugh, I felt as if she was already laughing at him. The rich, musical notes of her merriment reminded me that he might be grossly fat, or boorish, or stupid. And now the smile had left her lips, the story of her Italian holiday was evidently over …. I felt that she was standing there, tense and expectant, waiting for Mervyn to be perfectly frightful. And on top of all this, I noticed now, for the first time, that Janice still hadn’t come down. Whether she was crying, or sulking, or fixing her false eyelashes, I had no means of knowing; I only knew that Anna, too, would have noticed her absence; would be assessing it; allotting it to some labelled pigeon-hole in her calculating and retentive mind. At this thought, Janice’s non-appearance began to swell up in my mind, to take on vast and absurd proportions. Supposing she didn’t come down at all—how odd it would look! Or supposing she did come, but—with Anna watching—made her prejudice against her prospective brother-in-law blatantly and disastrously obvious? Or supposing Sarah herself looked less than radiant as she introduced her fiancé? Supposing … supposing … supposing … and at that moment we all heard the front door slam, and then rapid footsteps in the hall.
    The moment had come.

CHAPTER III
    I DON’T KNOW about the rest of the company, but for me it seemed to be nearly half a minute before I took in the fact that Sarah had come alone. The tiny, dwarfish Mervyns; the tall, stooping ones; the oafish ones, the vulgar ones—I kept